Chapter VII: Deportation Days (1)

I

Rupert Alvin would have worried more about his runaway daughter, if he had not had so many troubles at home to keep him occupied. It seemed as if all the devils in Puritan New England broke loose that summer of 1919. There were a couple of million soldier boys turned out of the training camps, and flotilla loads returning from France, and no jobs to go round. They took to crime, to bootlegging, to striking, to demanding bonuses, to all kinds of behavior which kept bankers lying awake at night. The war-orders, the great prop of prosperity, had been pulled from underneath, and business was like a man waking up on the morning after a celebration.

The cost of living had been going up all through the war, but now it went faster than ever; there was a shortage of everything, and nobody could live on his salary. Out in Seattle there was a general strike, almost a revolution; while close at home, in Lawrence, a strike of the mill-workers had to be put down by kidnaping the leaders and beating them insensible with brass “knucks” and blackjacks. And then, in Boston, the most incredible event of all--a strike of policemen! Of the safest “cops” in the whole of civilization, Irish-Catholics trained in humility and obedience in parochial schools especially established for the purpose! Truly, it seemed the end of Rupert Alvin’s world.

The policemen had been grumbling about their wages all through the year. Some were getting as low as ninety-two dollars a month, and how could a man keep a family on that? They grumbled about the way they were housed--many of them in that old Joy Street station, which had been built before the Civil War, and was dirty and verminous. They went on grumbling, and the authorities went on putting them off--for if you paid living wages to policemen, what would be left for politicians? In August the grumblers formed a union, and joined the American Federation of Labor. Treason and red rebellion under the very shadow of Bunker Hill monument, on the very steps of “Funnel” Hall!

There were at this time two great banking groups competing for the mastery of Boston’s affairs; like the wars of the Guelphs and the Ghibellines in ancient Florence. Parker, Jones and Company, one of these concerns, stood in with the city administration, and their Democratic mayor appointed them as a committee to sit down with the leaders of the union and work out a settlement. The policemen were to get their “raise,” and everything would be polite. But they had omitted to consult Rupert Alvin and the Pilgrim National crowd; and Rupert was incensed that his dignity should thus be flouted. Also, he had religious convictions on the subject of labor unions. For policemen to organize and wring concessions by threats was a challenge to the very being of the state. If a Democratic mayor were allowed to bargain with Democratic Irish-Catholic labor leaders, and pay out the city’s money under duress, the Republican Rupert might as well retire from his job of running Massachusetts and Europe.

He consulted first with Henry Cabot Winters, as was his custom; then he got his associates together and told them his plan. Never would there be another such opportunity to teach a lesson to the forces of disorder. The policemen’s union must be broken, its leaders driven from the force, and not a man who went on strike should ever again be employed by the city. Rupert carried his point, and the heads of the Chamber of Commerce were called in and won over, and the police commissioner was summoned and told of the decision. Fortunate indeed that this official was appointed by the governor and not by the mayor, and so was a “blue-blood” and not a demagogue!

The business men of the city had rallied to defend their property. The president of Harvard had offered a thousand students, and all these volunteers were ready to go on patrol-duty the moment they were called. The policemen had given ample notice; they would strike at five forty-five o’clock on the afternoon of September ninth; and moreover they left four hundred of the old men to protect property. But it was Rupert’s plan to teach the city, and indeed the whole country, a lesson by a demonstration of what it meant for policemen to form a labor union. To that end the old policemen were kept shut up in headquarters, and the volunteers were not summoned until nine o’clock the next morning. For one whole night Boston was to be without any police protection whatever; and to make assurance doubly sure, one of the big detective agencies supplied a few men to throw bricks through the windows of department-stores and start things moving. That the plotters had actually done this was never proved, but you would meet many “blue-bloods,” familiar with the gossip of the clubs, who were certain that it had been done; and several years later, when Boston saw its leading bankers on the witness-stand in the case of Jerry Walker, and heard them lying about how they had got possession of the felt-industry of New England--then Boston was ready to believe anything about bankers!

II

Whoever started it, the windows were smashed, and men and boys jumped through the holes and helped themselves to what they wanted; you saw women sitting on the curb-stones, fitting themselves with expensive shoes. There were many hold-ups that night, and some rape; more horrifying yet, there were crap-games going on the Common--on the very steps of the State House with its golden dome. It is characteristic of Boston that this breach of decorum was the thing which stamped itself upon the public mind, and stands out in unwritten history. Three hundred crap-games in broad daylight--that shows you what the mob is like, and what would happen if there were no hickory clubs to hold it down!

The merchants of the city were in a panic, putting up barricades in front of their shops, arming their clerks and spending the night in a state of siege. The picture of Boston in the hands of its criminal element had gone all over the country; Boston papers had made a fearful panic, and the faithful press agencies had spread it; so Rupert’s lesson had been taught, and it was time for the city to be saved. The mayor called out some of the state militia--under an old law he had the right to call the part which belonged to Boston. He wanted to call the rest, but for this an order from the governor was needed; and here came an unexpected hitch in the program of “law and order.”

The representative of Anglo-Saxon superiority in the State House happened to be a gentleman by the name of Calvin Coolidge, whose story is one of the oddest ever invented by that Great Novelist who makes up history. A thin-lipped, tight little man, a petty lawyer and bill-collector from the western part of the state, “Cal” had got elected to the legislature, and attracted the attention of the Republican boss because he always did exactly what he was told, and never said a word that could be left unsaid. If a politician has an opinion he is bound to offend somebody; so, obviously, the wise course is to have no opinion on any subject. Strange, that no one ever thought of it before “Cautious Cal”!

The man who ran the Republican state machine through this period was a multimillionaire senator by the name of Murray Crane. He had established for his good political boys what was known as the “escalator system,” or the “Massachusetts ladder.” So long as they took orders, and kept themselves presentable to the voters, he would promote them regularly, step by step. It was a slow process, and you were old when you got to the top, but Massachusetts liked that, it is old itself. In this case, however, there developed a phenomenon known as “Coolidge luck”; as if the fates were amusing themselves by boosting this feeblest man in the state machine. Among the legislators aspiring to the state senate there existed a “rotation agreement”; there was never any competition at the primaries, each town took its turn. But the man ahead of Coolidge died, and he jumped into the place. Then, as a state senator who had never made a speech, he learned that the man in line for president of the senate had attacked woman suffrage. When the suffragists asked the views of Calvin, he shut the tightest and thinnest pair of lips in Massachusetts. The women attacked the other man and beat him at the polls, and Calvin presented his claims to the boss, and became president of the senate. Clear the way!

Next it happened that the man who was scheduled to become lieutenant-governor made the mistake of speaking in favor of prohibition. Again Calvin kept his masterly silence, and the liquor interests switched to him, and he was nominated. He served two terms as lieutenant-governor, at a time when everybody was sick of politics, and was pleased with a man who said nothing and did nothing. As a reward they made him governor; and now here was a crisis, and two big groups of bankers pulling him this way and that! There was nothing for him but physical flight, and for twenty-four hours no one connected with the government knew where the governor was to be found.

At last Rupert dug him out, on the farm of Murray Crane, who had pushed him up the escalator. They had a night session, and Calvin heard such things as never will be printed in any history-book. When the time came to call out the state guard, he did what he was told; the machine-guns went into action on Boston Common, and fired a whole volley of shots heard round the world.

As for Calvin, he waited several days, until it was evident that Rupert’s strategy had been successful; public sentiment had turned against the strikers. Then Calvin rushed forward, waving in his hand a telegram to Samuel Gompers, proclaiming in clarion tones: “There is no right to strike against the public safety, by anybody, anywhere, at any time!” That was, of course, what the capitalist press wanted at the moment; the governor’s proclamation took the front page all the way from Boston to Seattle--where there had been a rival strike and a rival hero. One of these two masterful men was destined to become vice-president and then president of the United States on the basis of his heroism; while the other was destined to become a super salesman of real estate, unloading ten thousand subdivision lots upon admiring “come-ons.” Which hero was to be which was a matter of a toss-up in a hotel-room, at the tail end of a long-drawnout political convention. It may have been “Coolidge luck”--and again, it may have been the fact that the Massachusetts leaders were able to certify that here was a man who had never once expressed an opinion in twenty years of public life, and had never once questioned an order from Murray Crane, who had pushed him up the escalator.

III

This police strike cost the community three million dollars; nor did the community make it up out of policemen’s wages, because it granted to the new men more than it had refused to the old. But that was all right to Rupert Alvin. In the first place, it wasn’t his money; and in the second place, it was not a question of money, but of what he called “principle”--meaning the bankers’ right to have their way. The “mob” really had learned a lesson; there would be no more crap-shooting on the Common, and no more labor unions among public servants.

Neither Rupert nor any of his crowd reckoned the dumb resentment smoldering in the hearts of fourteen hundred men, who had thought themselves guardians of law and order, and now discovered that they were pawns in a game of power. These men had been pleading for a living for themselves and their families; they had been polite enough, humble enough--until they saw these qualities unheeded. They had served the city faithfully--some for twenty or thirty years; even the Back Bay admitted the virtues of those whom it knew. You would hear ladies of the Sewing Circle exclaim, “What do you suppose has become of that lovely policeman who used to help us across Boylston Street in front of Trinity Church? The one that got books from the library, and asked for something about the Æneid!” That story, told by the librarian, had been a tradition of the Back Bay forever after. So appropriate to Boston, to have a policeman who got books from the library, and actually appreciated the Æneid!

Cornelia Thornwell came back from Russia to find her city in a grim mood, with armed soldiers patrolling all the streets. The time for nonsense was past, the Bolshevik menace was going to be put down. The word “nonsense” included the fact that an elderly woman, once of high respectability, but now badly “cracked,” had run away from her family and spent two months in Soviet Russia. Cornelia found that no newspaper in Boston manifested interest in what she had done; none desired to tell its readers about the condition of women in that city of Saratov where the “nationalization” story had started. No, the Boston papers wanted highly flavored horrors, invented by tsarist refugees in Riga and Helsingfors and Warsaw and Bucharest and Constantinople; they would pay the tolls to have such inventions cabled, but they wanted no facts which could be got by sending a reporter to an apartment on the north side of Beacon Hill.

Privately, of course, some of the “blue-bloods” got a tremendous “kick” out of Cornelia’s story. Henry Cabot Winters came to dinner and spent a most interesting evening. Quincy Thornwell came, and loaded up with stories to tell to the guests at Mrs. Jack Gardner’s. That was gossip, and gossip has always been the privilege of good society. But when it came to public utterances--to a newspaper interview, or a speech at some meeting--that was a different matter; that was Bolshevik propaganda, undermining the bases of American civilization. The word Bolshevism had become the worst of all terms of abuse, and covered everything in the modern world you did not like. The Massachusetts Chamber of Commerce issued a pronouncement to the effect that the new prohibition amendment was a Bolshevik conspiracy!

Rupert Alvin declined to meet his mother-in-law. He might have got from her first-hand information as to the outcome of his enterprise to overthrow the communist régime in Hungary, but he would not sacrifice his dignity by admitting that Cornelia’s crazy jaunt could have even that much use. Rupert proposed to handle his mother-in-law and his daughter as he had handled the policemen’s strike. The time for nonsense was past.

Deborah came to see her mother, and listened with painful reserve while Cornelia assured her that Betty was perfectly all right, and there was no need to worry. Betty was turning into a very fine woman, the best of the lot of them; she was doing a useful work in Buda-Pesth, and was justified in ignoring her father’s cablegrams. Nor would she suffer because Rupert had cut off her funds. Her salary of thirty dollars a week was quite regal for any part of Central Europe. As for Cousin Letitia, she might become the wife of the elderly Hungarian playwright, Hubay, if the family would put up one or two thousand dollars for a “dot.” Cornelia herself had had a most instructive experience; the world was changing, and her children would have to learn, as she had learned, to adjust their minds to new ideas.

Deborah pressed her tight lips together--for she had come with a stern resolve not to wrangle with her poor distracted mother. “We have done considerable adjusting of our minds this fall,” she said. “We have seen crap-games on the Common, and machine-guns also. We have known what it feels like to lie awake all night in fear of the murderous mob.” And that was true--for Rupert had not been able to convince his wife of his complete mastery of the situation. Not even four private policemen guarding her home had sufficed. Like most of the ladies on Commonwealth Avenue, Deborah had looked under all the beds that night, and had visions of her treasures being looted and her dignified person “nationalized.”

IV

But if the capitalist press did not care to hear about the adventures of Mrs. Josiah Quincy Thornwell in Russia, rest assured that there were plenty of socialists, communists and anarchists who did. Cornelia was besought to come and talk to this group and that; she was urged to write down what she had seen, and let it be printed in a pamphlet; and when she consented, it meant that she had definitely committed herself as a “Red,” and was listed in the card-files of the Department of Justice as an active Bolshevist. In the month of November “red headquarters” in Boston was raided, with much uproar, and everybody in it arrested and “held for deportation.” Among the truckloads of literature confiscated were some of Cornelia’s; and although Rupert was able to keep it out of the papers, he brought the story home to the horrified family, and Deborah conveyed to her mother the warning that she stood within the shadow of arrest, and that her family’s influence would not again be used in her behalf.

Vanzetti spent an evening in the little apartment, and heard all that Cornelia had to tell, and asked a hundred questions, and carried her answers to the “gruppo” in Plymouth and the “clooba” in East Boston. There were fierce debates going on among the anarchists as to the attitude they should take to the rapidly spreading soviet movement. Some were disposed to weaken in their anti-state principles. Government was a bad thing, so long as it was an instrument for suppressing workers; but when it became an instrument for suppressing counter-revolution, then it was no longer so easy to decide. But “individualistas” like Vanzetti stood immovable, and as a result, many of them were in trouble in Russia; some had been shot, and others were in jail. So Vanzetti hated the Russian government as much as he hated the American, and was grieved by any good word that Cornelia had to say about it.

A very confusing situation! However, Cornelia had been watching the radical movement for four years now, and could talk the language of the different groups, and understand their reactions. That was more than the capitalist press could do, or the police, or the department of justice agents, or the courts, or any others who had the public ear in this crisis.

The job of “mopping up” the Reds was on in earnest. Congress had appropriated a couple of million dollars--which is the way to make things happen in America. All the big detective agencies were feeding at the trough, and the card-file of suspects now counted a total of two hundred thousand names--so the Attorney-General told a committee of Congress. This gentleman, oddly enough, was a Quaker, and under the combined banners of William Penn and Jesus Christ was instituting a campaign of wholesale terror, the like of which had not been known in America since the Iroquois Indians had been routed from upper New York state.

The prisoners taken in the November raids, together with a number of anarchists such as Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, were loaded onto an old government transport, the “Buford,” and on the twenty-first of December this vessel, known to the newspapers as the “Soviet Ark,” set forth for Russia. It was a beginning of the program recommended by all patriotic orators, “If they don’t like this country, let them go back where they came from.” Here and there you found one even more ardent--such as the statesman who said that he “would send them in a ship of stone with sails of lead”! Such was the “Christmas spirit,” as manifested in America a year after the ending of the war to end war!

V

“Dear Nonna,” wrote Vanzetti from Plymouth, “come to see us little bit for Christmas. All Italian anarchista is unhappy and fear will come truble for us after finish Russian. Is no more Cronaca, and no leader in New England since Galleani is deport. Would be good have you come for letting us know one American lady understand worker and is not afraid for speaking. Vincenzo got bottle good Dago Red in cellar, it is not prohibitioned, for was there before. Trando has learn new melody by violin, it is ‘When you and I were young, Maggie.’ Fay is putting corns on string for decorate, it is word not in book, but is white corns which produces noise on stove. Alfonsina is working now by cordage and I have expection of much business for Christmas, it is time for all Italian eating eel and I have order for barrel of living to be deliver from Boston. Your esteeming friend, Bartolomeo Vanzetti.”

Christmas Day was on Friday, and Cornelia wrote that she could not come on that day, but would come Saturday morning and stay over Sunday. Not all the witch-hunts in New England could keep the Thornwell family from inviting her on Christmas Day, and from having their feelings hurt if she failed to appear. Clara, who had a monopoly on young children, was naturally the hostess, and “Hillview” the place. It was one of those great family reunions, when the clan say by their presence those things which are never said in words. Three faces were missing since last Christmas. Ahab would never be seen again; the spine of Great-aunt Priscilla had become solidified to such an extent that not all the pride in New England could bring her to a Christmas party; and Betty was in Buda-Pesth, handing out loaves of bread to the children of war-refugees.

“Hillview” was much changed from the day, now four and a half years past, when Cornelia had run away from it. James had kept his promise to leave the old part intact, but he had put on a monstrous new building in the rear, for the eight young ones and their numerous nurses and governesses and servants, as well as for guests--it was a luxurious hotel. The children were all over the place, racing about, shouting, bumping their heads on the hardwood floors, tramping nuts and raisins into priceless rugs, smearing chocolate candy on white brocaded upholstery. Christmas came but once a year, and one must not find fault; one must exchange sticky kisses, and admire a tree so tall that it went up to the second story, standing in the curve of the winding stairway. It shone with a myriad little lights, red, blue, green and yellow, and was piled around with enormous quantities of expensive toys, really marvels of ingenuity and workmanship, all of which would be broken and thrown on the junk-pile, or forgotten in the attic a month from now.

Also there were the grown-ups to be greeted: Clara, rounder than ever, lamenting that no arts of any specialist helped to reduce her; James, solid and matter-of-fact, expanding with his vast prosperity, and with the importance of himself as host. Not for a million dollars would he have said it in words, but his manner made clear that “Hillview” was no longer “Thornwell,” it was “Scatterbridge.” Deborah, stately in a creation of purple velvet; Rupert, with complexion to match his wife’s dress, and a manner of impeccable cordiality to Cornelia, as if such a thing as a quarrel with a mother-in-law had never been heard of in Boston. Alice Thornwell Winters, whose elegance and grace paid no tribute to the passing years; Henry Cabot Winters, dapper and genial; their son, Josiah, still growing length ways, and pale--perhaps from overstudy, as his fond mother said, perhaps from what the savage Betty described as “woman-chasing.” Also there was Deborah’s older daughter, Priscilla, tall and dignified; it had been four years and more since she had raped the rug, and the crime was forgotten.

Not a word about Betty, nor anything else to humiliate Cornelia, or to remind her of her fall from grace. Unless you count Great-uncle Abner, poring over the _Transcript_, and commenting on a wireless dispatch from the “Soviet Ark,” now four days at sea. “Says it’s stormy, and the passengers are seasick.” The deaf man’s voice of Abner boomed from the library and filled all downstairs. “Well, I’d cure their seasickness if I had my way!”

“They say there’s no cure for it known!” shouted Abner’s son, Quincy.

“No cure?” Abner’s voice broke into a hoot. “I can tell them a cure--dump the two hundred and forty-nine beggars overboard, and they’ll be cured in a couple of minutes!”

There was a pause while the old man turned over the paper. When he broke loose again, it was the “crime wave,” unfailing topic at all New England gatherings. “Country going clean to the dogs! See that story about the holdup in Bridgewater yesterday? Coming to a fine pass when a shoe-company can’t bring its payroll from the bank without having shot-gun battles in the middle of the street! Read that?”

“Yes, I read it,” said Quincy.

“Right out in the middle of Broad Street, corner of Hale--you know the place?”

“I know it.”

“Big wide street, trees on both sides, trolley-car down the middle. And, by jingo, if two bandits in an automobile don’t pop out and open fire on the pay-truck, just after daylight, half-past seven yesterday morning! _Transcript_ says the police have no clew to the bandits. Wonder what police are for!”

“To go on strike, father.”

“It’s these foreigners!” And Uncle Abner leaned closer to his son’s ear, which was not in the least deaf. “Infernal foreigners we’ve let come in and ruin the country! Sixty years I kept telling it to Josiah--ought to have stopped them. First Irish, then Jews, then Dagoes, then Hunkies, then God knows what. They’ve taken the country from us--the old stock might as well move out, they steal everything we’ve got. Ought to take every steamer that brought ’em over and make ’em take ’em back free, that’s what I say!”

Did Uncle Abner know that Cornelia was in the music-room with the children, and hearing every word he shouted? Maybe so, for he was a shrewd old rascal, and you’re only supposed to be polite when you know it. “Ought to ship ’em back where they came from, and all those sentimentalists that encourage ’em go along!”

VI

Cornelia left the palace of Thornwell-Scatterbridge, and went to the humble tenement in North Plymouth. Here too was Christmas, but on a minor scale. The tree was not quite up to Cornelia’s shoulder, and the decorations were half a dozen red and yellow baubles, two for five cents at the grocery-store, a few strands of tinsel, some red ribbon off a package Cornelia had sent, and finally, long strings of snow-white “corns,” with three pairs of small-sized but ravenous jaws waiting until Cornelia should have seen the spectacle before commencing the work of destruction. The presents, ranged under the tree for her inspection, were few and cheap--with the single exception of three fine story-books which had come from Boston. They were now set up conspicuously, and three children clamored their happy thanks.

The Brinis had long ago found out who Cornelia was; they knew that she came from a great rich family; yet not all the cruel “class consciousness” in the world could weaken their trust in her. It seemed to Cornelia that this offered some hint of how to avoid the stresses of the war between capital and labor; also for the bitter strife between the old Yankees and the new foreigners, and for the “crime wave,” and many other troubles of the time. But when she told that theory to her friends of the great world, they called it “sentimental,” and went on with their wiser and more practical plan of jailing and deporting and killing. Also most of the so-called “class-conscious” revolutionists would have agreed that Cornelia’s program was “sentimental”; so apparently the jailing and deporting and killing had to continue.

They had a grand supper that Saturday night. Alfonsina had made bean-soup, which Vanzetti was “crazy about”--he admitted it; and budino, a kind of custard pudding, and tortellini, a dish of meat cooked in noodles. Vanzetti was a vegetarian on principle, because he thought it wicked to kill animals for food; but once in a while he fell from grace, and the occasion was apt to be tortellini. The animal was already dead, said Trando; but Bart would not permit that sophistry--when we ate meat, he said, we caused another animal somewhere to be killed, it was the law of supply and demand. He spoke of animals as his “fellow creatures,” and this gave the children great glee; they would bring home a crab, or perhaps a big spider, and refer to it as “Bart’s fellow creature.” But that did not trouble the philosopher; he made it the occasion for a lecture on the wonders of nature. All these strange beings did really have a life like us, at least the beginnings of it; each one knew all the things it needed to know in order to take care of itself--and many a man was not so wise.

Vincenzo had given his wife a tiny glass bowl with three gold-fish for a Christmas present; and this stood now on a table in the little parlor, by the window, where the light shone through it. Bart was fascinated by these creatures, he would stand watching them literally for an hour at a time. He was wondering what it was like to be a gold-fish. If you dropped a bit of food into the bowl, the fish would know it and take it into their mouths; if it was not the right food, they would spit it out again. What told them that? What had taught them not to flee from a man’s hand--though fish in the wild state would do so? Did the fish know that man existed, and what did they think about him? Strange questions one could ask about life!

Trando got out his violin, and played “When you and I were young, Maggie.” So many sweet songs made you sad! The little boy played it several times, and Bart hummed the words which the children had taught him. A wonderful act of creation, making a melody out of the chaos of all the scratchings that were possible on four violin strings! The Brinis were so proud, something fine was coming out of their lives, something better than “working by cordage” all your life, better than “living like pigs,” as the Yankees phrased it.

“Some day maybe we get piano,” said Bart. “Fay she learn play, we have grand music.”

“Oh, yes, we’ll get a piano!” said Trando, and added, in school-boy dialect, “I don’t think!” He was twelve years old now, and America was teaching him to be a little “fresh” at times. “It’ll be like that horse you were going to get me!” He explained to Cornelia, “He promised me a horse to drive the day before Christmas. He had a barrel of eels to deliver, and I was to help him, and for two weeks he was telling me I’d have a horse and wagon, and I didn’t think about nothing else all the time. But when the day come it was the same old push-cart.”

“It is baker got horse and wagon,” explained Bart. “He promise for rent heem one day, but then he cannot, so must pusha da cart. Trando he see--what you call it, visione--heemself sit in seat, make noise with whip, ‘Gittup!’--granda gentleman, all little Italian girl come look, say what is this, something wonderfool! But instead to crack whip, he musta carry basket with package eel. He is little scare, for eel he is live and make move--what you say?”

“Wiggle,” put in Fay.

“Mooch wiggle!” said Bart. “Little boy tink maybe he come out from paper, make bite!”

“No, I wasn’t scared,” said Trando, “but I knew they were my fellow creatures and I didn’t like to have them killed.” They all laughed--even Vincenzo, who did not understand jokes in English. Bart, with his vegetarian scruples, was hard put to it to justify his conduct in having a barrel of his living fellow creatures shipped to him by express, and turning them over to the murderous fury of two score Italian housewives, who had skinned them alive and put them in salt for the next day’s feast, as much a tradition with the Italians as turkey in all Yankee homes.

VII

Sunday morning they went for a walk--on the street, because the woods were full of snow. Coming home, Vanzetti bought a Boston newspaper, because he wanted to know what was happening in Italy. Cornelia read him a brief item, how the Italian workers were forming shop-councils, preparing to take over industry from the capitalists. They talked about this, and how it would happen in different countries. Vanzetti had made a speech in a hall in Plymouth. “I force-èd be spikker,” he explained, because the man who was supposed to be “spikker” had such wrong ideas. Bart knew that any one who discussed anarchist ideals in public in these critical days ran risk of arrest, and of deportation or worse. But he would not be silenced, and Cornelia knew that he would not, and did not even suggest it. “Anarchista musta make propaganda!”

The children had got hold of the comic supplement, and were devouring it, laughing over the jokes and explaining them to their mother. This humor dealt with incipient young criminals, who perpetrated every indignity upon their elders. And meantime the elders were reading about the product of a previous decade of comic papers--the “crime wave” and its latest manifestations. There was more news about the Bridgewater hold-up, which Cornelia had heard Abner Thornwell discussing. Bridgewater was only twenty-two miles from Plymouth, and in the same county, so the attempted robbery had been much talked about. Now the shoe-company was offering a thousand dollars’ reward for the bandits, and Vanzetti remarked, “You offer plenty money, you catch plenty feller. Is always polissmen, witness, for swear poor feller in jail.”

He went on to say, how stupid for people to be surprised by the crime wave. “You send million feller to Europe, you put heem in army, give gun, teach heem keell; you bring heem back, he go home, find some odder feller got his job, got his girl; he look for job, cannot find, he is hungry--you think he don’t steal? Is foolish for not onderstand, is people do not want onderstand.”

“You think the cause of crime is always economic?”

“Shoore, Nonna, I not think all men alike. Some men is strong, is got what you call--carattere--”

“Character.”

“He will not do crime, he will die before do crime. But nodder man, he is weak, is too much tempt, he sees friend do crime, get plenty money, he try sometime, maybe get caught, he go jail. Is worst place for make criminal, is jail, is like school, learn how to do it. You go like me, Nonna, you work one job, work nodder job, meet onderd, meet thousand worker, you meet plenty young criminal, young feller vanaglorioso for what he do, think he is smart feller; I hear heem talk, I know what is make crime wave. Is great reech men, spend beeg money--automobile, gooda dress, fine lady--what you say, lusso--luxury. Poor feller, he look, he like to live sooch life, have plenty money, plenty girl. He say, ‘How come it reech man he get it, how come in bég-ginnin’”--Bart accented the word on the first syllable--“how come in bég-ginnin’ he make the money? Is reecha man honest? Is it sistema honest? He see everywhere beeg thief get plenty money, not ever punish. He see, you steal thousand dollar, you call-èd bandit, you steal million dollar, you call-èd banker. Is it not true, Nonna?”

Cornelia thought of Jerry Walker and his felt-plants. “It is sometimes true, Bart.”

“All right, is injoostice. So long you have injoostice, is crime; more injoostice, more crime. Is like something you make in chimica--it come all time the same way. But reech man he not like to hear sooch thing, is better for heem call bad name, make polissman, put heem in blue clothe, give heem big cloob, send heem out to hit poor feller on head, put heem in jail. Big crime come, all right, get more polissman, make thousand dollar what you call it--reward--get plenty stool-pigeon, you onderstand?”

“Yes, I know what you mean.”

“Is always rotten feller, swear anything for money, send somebody to jail. All polissman want is catch somebody, all newspaper want is catch somebody, fill up jail, so reecha man is happy, is what you call law and order. You wait, Nonna, you see--thousand dollar will make sure--catch plenty Bridgewater bandit!”

Strange and awful are the fates that dispose of mortals--leading us blindfolded through curtains of black fog. How could it happen that Bart could speak such words, and no shaft of lightning split the fog, no warning finger pierce the curtain, no voice shout in thunder-tones, “You! You! You!” They sat chatting casually, criticizing each other’s theories; the children laughed, bringing them pictures of the Goofy Googles; Alfonsina washed the dinner dishes, and Vincenzo, not being able to share in the argument, fell asleep in his chair; the gold-fish wiggled their silken-filmy tails, and the Powers that sent the universe on its course, benevolent or heedless, omniscient or omninescient, sent no smallest hint of the fact that Bartolomeo Vanzetti was himself that “poor feller” whom the thousand-dollar reward was to bring down for the Bridgewater crime!

VIII

Cornelia went back to Boston, and found a letter from Betty:

“I have been having so many adventures, I hardly know where to
start telling. I have been experiencing very eloquent and romantic
love-making from one of the sons of ‘Archie.’ That is our nickname
for the Austrian arch-duke who came in with the Roumanian armies
and put himself on the throne, to the great dismay of the allies.
This son is tall and somber and splendidly-idle. I can understand
how it is that American husbands are found unsatisfactory. I try
to imagine Father or Uncle James making such speeches! He pays
endless compliments in carefully perfected English; but the trouble
is he doesn’t really know me at all. He is content that I am the
daughter of a rich American banker; he doesn’t guess my political
opinions, and I dare not tell him, because I might lose my job! But
it will be a good thing for His Highness to have his self-assurance
reduced. He says that American girls are made of marble, and I
smile and tell him it is his first contact with a social equal.
Then I have to explain about the Back Bay!

“Also there is an undersecretary at the legation who is eating
his heart out over me. He is quite different, rather tongue-tied,
but serious, I fear. He comes from the middle west, and doesn’t
really know me either--though of course it is possible for him to
understand how I can be virtuous though unchaperoned. I am also
causing misery to a young lady of our mission, who is in love with
the undersecretary. Apparently not all the troubles in Europe are
enough to keep people from entanglements of the heart. I think
it is rather the contrary, the general disorganization upsets
everybody, and leaves the fancy roaming.

“While I am on the subject, I might mention that I was violently
besieged by one of the Bolshevik agents before he took flight to
Switzerland disguised as a chauffeur. He told me I was not truly
a free woman at all, but a wretched little Puritan that would dry
up and blow away at an early age. I showed him Cousin Letitia, who
is still capable of being thrilled, but not of being seduced, even
by the elderly playwright Hubay. There is something inside our
marrow-bones, deeper than we realize, and stronger than our ideas.
Roger Lowell would be surprised to hear that about me! Anyhow, I
am sure there will be no love-affairs for me until I get back to
America; it would be like a romance in a morgue.

“The suffering here is dreadful beyond words. I suppose you get
news in the papers, but probably not true, because everything is
propaganda for somebody or something. It really was the charitable
Mr. Hoover who overthrew the Reds here in Hungary. I don’t know
if it is published at home, but here all his aides are proud of
it, and tell the details and boast. We are managed by a California
lawyer, one of Herbert’s intimate friends, and they not merely
blockaded and boycotted Red Hungary, but they bought some of the
labor leaders to overthrow the Bolsheviks.

“It has been like a kaleidescope; you never know when you wake up
in the morning who is governing you--till you get to the office
and hear what happened during the night. The Reds went out, and
then came the Roumanian army with ‘Archie,’ and we had to drive
him out and get a White régime--which is rapidly turning into a
dictatorship. Those poor fool labor-leaders who let themselves be
used to turn out the Reds have mostly been shot or had their skulls
cracked, and I wonder what our noble-minded Herbert thinks about
it. There ought to be some way to make the White gentlemen come sit
in the pools of blood, as we relief-workers have to do.

“It has taught me my lesson; ‘law and order’ talk will never fool
me again. It really seems as if our master-minds want to teach
labor that there can be no middle course, and no honesty or decency
in the class struggle. The Reds here fell because they were too
gentle, and let their enemies plot against them. The Russians made
a clean sweep, so they survive. And don’t let any one fool you
about the amount of killing they did; don’t let any one frighten
you with talk about the ‘mob.’ From this time on I take the dear
‘mob’ to my heart; I am only afraid of dashing young gentlemen
in gaudy uniforms, and elderly diplomats and business men in
dinner-jackets. There isn’t a country in Central Europe where the
Whites haven’t killed ten for every one the Reds have killed, and
in many cases it has been a hundred for one.

“And the worst is, Grannie, these White dictatorships are all
American-made--with guns and uniforms from our army and dollars
from our bankers. They have got an American loan here in Hungary,
and I am wondering if father is in on it. He probably won’t tell
you, but ask Uncle Quincy--he knows. If it’s true, I’ll never take
another dollar from Father--and I’ll tell him so.

“Dear Grannie, do please take care of yourself, because if anything
were to happen to you, what would I do, with not a soul to
understand me? Sometimes I get frightened, and get alone in my room
and have a good cry; because, after all, it is absurd to think that
a girl not yet twenty-one should know more than all her family put
together. You know what Great-aunt Priscilla says, so very calmly:
‘You will be wiser when you are older.’

“Maybe the ‘antis’ were right, Grannie--women are not meant to
meddle in politics! Maybe we ought to stay at home and look after
the babies, like Aunt Clara. But when we get the babies raised, the
old men step in and send them off to the battle-field, so what’s
the use? I go over and over it in my mind, and the only conclusion
is that this generation of girls must go on strike, and refuse to
have babies until the men stop killing. So I shall stick it out,
and when I come back the family will find me worse than ever.
I suppose you are having troubles enough at home; tell me all,
but write as if I did not agree with your ideas. I have a way of
getting this letter smuggled out, but your letters to me may be
opened, and I don’t want to lose my job quite yet.”

IX

Yes, Cornelia had her troubles. The day after New Year’s there burst upon Boston and the whole country a storm known as the deportations delirium. To the Quaker Attorney-General had come a brilliant idea; he would win the Democratic nomination for the presidency, upon the basis of his heroic services in deporting the Reds. The two million dollars which Congress had voted him would be turned into a campaign fund for the glory of Jesus Christ and William Penn.

The ingenious Quaker arranged to lure his victims into public meetings, and have the police appear suddenly and bar the doors, and sort out all the foreign ones, and load them into patrol wagons. The problem of getting the Reds all over the country to come to meetings on the same night was comparatively simple, because the government had put so many spies into the radical organizations that they had elected themselves to office, and were in position to call meetings whenever they pleased. Also they had been able to vote resolutions and adopt manifestos of such violence as to make the deportations legally possible. As Federal Judge Anderson of Boston said when the facts came out in his court: “It is perfectly clear on the evidence before me that the Government owned and operated a part, at least, of the Communist Party.” It was one time when all business men believed in government ownership!

The raids were scheduled for the night of January second, 1920, and netted some four thousand prisoners. Twenty cities and towns in New England contributed a thousand--including thirty-nine who had met for the purpose of organizing a cooperative bakery. The prisoners were lined up against the walls of police-stations, searched and beaten by detectives, denied counsel, denied reliable translators, and sentenced on the spot by officials of the Department of Immigration. They were loaded into vans and taken to the immigration station in Boston, and thence to Deer Island prison. In order to make the utmost possible amount of campaign material for the Quaker Attorney-General, the victims were chained together in pairs, and paraded down State Street, past the old State House, and over the rings of cobble-stones that mark the site of the Boston Massacre. Such a novelty brought newspaper photographers in swarms, and the story stayed on the front page for several days. Never such advertising for a presidential candidate.

Also the Department of Justice agents saw to it that good reading matter was supplied for the pictures. Four bombs had been found at one meeting, said the report; they were taken to a police station and put into a pail of water--and apparently dissolved in the water, for they were never heard of in court. Among the organizations raided was an amateur dramatic society, which had rented some old guns for use in a play; so the newspapers reported a “red arsenal.” Apart from stage properties, the police acquired a total of four firearms: this by a search of four thousand persons, and raiding their homes and breaking into their trunks. Apparently they had selected for deportation the least military group of individuals in America.

Here were the troubles for Cornelia Thornwell. Four hundred men and women jammed into cells in Deer Island prison, with broken window-panes in the midst of New England winter, with no blankets, no mattresses, and no adequate toilet facilities. Husbands torn from wives, mothers separated from their babies--and all held according to the genial Spanish custom known as “incommunicado,” denied lawyers, denied any information as to their fate. One woman, attending a meeting with her little girl, had been dragged to jail, and the child left to wander alone through the streets of Boston all that January night. One man flung himself over a railing five stories above the ground, and dashed out his brains in sight of the rest of the prisoners. Another went insane, and several others were on the verge. And concerning all this mass of misery no mention in the newspapers, and vilification for any one who dared to protest.

So Cornelia must sit at the telephone for hours, and argue and plead with her friends, and rush off to committee meetings, and get a stenographer and dictate letters, and pay for long telegrams to congressmen and senators and officials in Washington and New York. She must besiege club-women, and plead for opportunities to speak. She must meet newspaper reporters and give long interviews which never saw the light. She must haunt the doors of officials, and waylay them on the street when they would not see her. She must start a subscription list, and go round like a Salvation Army “lassie,” irritating bankers and lawyers and merchants, and their wives and daughters in the Sewing Circle, abusing her social position in shameless fashion to get at people, and tell them such harrowing stories that they would put up good Brahmin money to buy blankets for Bolsheviks, and milk for starving babies whose mothers and fathers had committed the crime of belonging to political parties owned and operated by the Department of Justice.

And this no job of a few days, but of months. The Quaker presidential candidate was slow to realize that he could not produce evidence against eighty per cent of all those he had seized. In Boston, through an unfortunate oversight, there was a Federal judge who believed that law-enforcers ought to obey the laws they enforced. He declared from the bench that a mob was a mob, even when it was made up of Department of Justice agents. He would issue writs for one prisoner after another, and when the prisoner was able to prove that he was an American citizen, or that he hadn’t actually joined the Department of Justice party, the victim would be turned loose. But all that took time--and meanwhile there were a thousand or two children to be fed, and as many falsehoods to be refuted, and only a small group of rebel ladies to do it.

X

Almost every Sunday during that winter Vanzetti came up to Boston. He was doing well with his fish-peddling, and in between times shoveling snow or cutting ice, so he had money for the trip and for propaganda. In the midst of all this repression he had made up his mind that the anarchistas must have a paper, and he was raising the seven hundred and fifty dollars needed to buy a linotype machine; he had even written a couple of articles to appear in the new paper, and was working hard to “culture himself,” studying both Italian and English. He came to have supper with Cornelia one evening, and when she ventured to point out the dangers of his course, he answered that you could never accomplish anything if you quit in times of danger. The times of accomplishment were bound to be times of danger--trust the capitalistas for that.

Many of the Galleani group had been deported; Coacci had been arrested--one of those two men who had brought a package of books to Bart--Cornelia had met him. The gruppo had raised a thousand dollars’ bail for him, and now he was under sentence of deportation. Also Nick Sacco was making his plans to take his family back to Italy. Great events were coming this next summer--perhaps the real revolution--and Nick as a man of action wanted to be there.

Yes, it would not be bad to be sent to Italy just now; but alas, you didn’t always get there! Bart told the terrible story of Compagno Marucco, who had been put on a steamer and never heard of again. All the anarchistas believed he had been pushed overboard on the way, because he had detected some of the government spies working among the group. Another man had hanged himself in his cell; had he really done that, or had somebody done it for him? You needed nerves of steel to go on with propaganda in the midst of events like that!

Bart talked about the spies. One had been exposed by Carlo Tresca in New York: Ravarini, who had posed as an anarchista for many months, one of the violent kind, a follower of Ravachol. One of his plans had been to revive “La Cronaco Sovversiva”; he had offered to get the money, and had suggested Bart for editor. But Bart had been too modest, he did not consider himself a well enough educated man.

This Ravarini had been seeking to fasten the bombings onto the Galleani group; for the government agents had apparently convinced themselves that this group was guilty. Bart discussed the idea, and he said there was no such great nonsense in the whole world. He pointed out what had happened--the police had arrested hundreds of anarchistas, and searched their homes, and had never found a bomb, nor anything having to do with a bomb. Some day the truth would come out--the guilt lay with detective agents, “feller get rich by hunting anarchista.”